The details of the Cuban Children’s Program, known by many today as “Operation Pedro Pan,” read like the plot of a fictitious spy-thriller. In late 1960, the federal government spearheaded a covert child evacuation program designed to ensure the safe passage of two hundred youngsters from Cuba to the United States, many of whom were the offspring of key figures in the island’s underground resistance movement. Over the next twenty-three months, the Children’s Program ballooned into a mass exodus of 14,048 minors that involved five agencies of the federal government, two agencies of the state of Florida, three private child welfare organizations, and thousands of families. The Children’s Program came to an abrupt end in October 1962, but not before it became a media cause célèbre that seemingly collapsed the drama of Cold War and the whimsy of a fairytale into the same historical moment. In this paper, I suggest that media coverage of “Operation Pedro Pan” offers a unique window into how Americans’ attitudes about gender and the moral authority of their government evolved in the early 1960s. Journalists characterized the men involved with the Children’s Program as conduits of an American state responsible for rescuing Cuba’s most vulnerable and impressionable citizens from Communism’s clutches. But even as celebrations of these surrogate fathers underscored (and perhaps justified) the expansion of American state power around the globe, they also obscured the consequences of U.S. foreign policies already in place.
About the presenterRisa M Katzen
Risa Katzen is Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University specializing in twentieth-century U.S. history. In 2015, she designed and taught her own undergraduate course called “The Americans are Coming!: The Cold War at Home and Abroad,” for which she won the Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award. She is currently writing a dissertation on U.S. foreign policy and child rescue that spans from 1945 to 1975.